To celebrate the release of Engage!, I was recently asked to share my thoughts on how social media impacts the advertising landscape for the current issue of Winning the Web, a popular magazine related to Web marketing. While the discussion opens with a review of the state and future of online advertising, the discussion also looks at the overall tectonic shift in new media and the profound opportunities that are unfolding.

With Ad:Tech San Francisco on the horizon, the timing couldn’t be better to share the entire interview with you here.

#Engage

Do you feel that there is a place for online advertisers and brands within the social media landscape, or do you think most “just don’t belong” there?

Online advertisers and brands indeed have a role in the social media landscape, it’s just different now. Brands, as well as the online advertisers and marketers that support them, are presented with a new opportunity to make direct connections that still yield traditional results but also set the stage for webwide advocacy and evangelism. To lure attention, the commitment changes from simply paying for visibility and investing in the story, visuals, and also offering a return for engagement, shifting from visibility to presence, which is felt. Essentially, paid media is becoming instrumental in triggering earned media in order to activate visitor experiences and activity.

Do you feel social media is being well-utilized by most companies or corporate entities today?

I believe that in order for companies to realize success in social media, they must become media. Many brands review case studies and plow through customer success stories as a form of inspiration for their experiments and endeavors. We assume, erroneously, that these examples apply to our business and more importantly, we presume that these examples represent success that was predefined and methodically implemented.

This is much more than collecting followers, fans or clickthroughs. It’s now the responsibility of the brand to program meaningful content that creates branded, yet personalized experiences to steer activity, offer guidance, provide resolution, and also spark word of mouth.

Look into your crystal ball – in three years, what do you think social media will mean and/or encompass?

Social Media will essentially become “Media” as we return to the ongoing evolution of new media. Social Media provided everyday users with powerful publishing platforms and the ability to establish influence, introducing production into the consumer consumption equation. It did not, however, change the need to rise above the noise by connecting people and content in order to raise awareness and cause measurable action.

The road to the future begins with understanding that attention is finite and is increasingly thinning, therefore we must connect with individuals where, when, and how their attention is focused. Technology is going to help, but we must help ourselves by introducing relevance, findability, and shareability into the mix. Intelligent filtering will become part of the consumption process, empowering consumers to view the most material information based on their behavior and connections. Priority will focus on aligning, qualifying, and presenting content sourced from the social graph and varying degrees of friends of friends networks.

There have been numerous stories written about companies and brands trying to monetize social media. Do you think these efforts are fruitless or do you feel social media can or should be money-making areas for advertisers?

Social Media is not owned by any one department and as such, the tools and services that populate the new media landscape should be viewed as just that, tools and services. It’s not unlike email for example. Every division affected by outside activity will require an external presence to influence respective activity that positively impacts online societies. As such, monetizing social media becomes an extension of various sales strategies that present those populating a social brand graph (connections forged in social networks related to brands) with offers, specials, rewards, incentives, discounts, etc. Many consumers have shouted in recent surveys that they hope and even expect to receive exclusive opportunities to purchase products or services via social channels such as Twitter and Facebook.

I have to respectfully disagree with your first point. Consumers use social media to connect with people. Companies' attempts to engage these forums are doomed to failure because these tools were never designed for the direct engagement you describe. Their attempts actually damage their brand as their messages are viewed as annoying and inauthentic by the majority of users. Instead, new tools need to be developed to facilitate this engagement – ones that were not designed for person-to-person socializing.

http://www.briansolis.com briansolis

Hello…I am not sure if you are speaking about social media use from your perspective or based on existing research. Mostly, the data I've reviewed, and through my own experience, shows the contrary. Social media users (people) are willfully connecting with companies online…and many of them in turn, actively refer brands that do engage to their connections within their social graphs.

timtasker

I must agree with Brian. People like to connect with companies in social media. In fact, most of them like to join the companies pages and have their logos on their profiles. That´s engaging. It´s the feeling of showing what you like and what your interests are.

Ignoring whether or not twitter will be adopted across all age ranges in the US, but do you think twitter facilities this type of engagement? There are no rules over person-person, it's not a social network per-se, I don't have friends, it's all about following…

I agree this does happen as you describe. But what doesn't get measured, and therefore doesn't get reported, is the vast number of users that get turned off by brand messages on these networks. More harm than good.

http://www.CKRinteractive.com/ Ralph Leon

I understand your point, but it doesn't do more harm that good. Of course people are going to get turn off by certain messages, people see over 3,000 ads a day. What companies are trying to do is become more interactive. Having a few brand loyal customers is more important than having a lot of customers who are only going to be one time buyers. Yes the companies can definitely learn from these turned off users, but not measuring this is not going to hurt a company. There has been data showing that fans on pages are more likely to buy products and what not. Good point though.

http://gordonmattey.com/ gordonmattey

Lateefivy, I'd like to explore this as it's an extremely valuable point and thinking about this number can help us as marketers understand our role in society…

For the sake of argument, let's say of all marketing today, 1% results in one-time or multiple purchases. The other 99% is wasted, and could turn people off and do more harm than good (that's how I read your suggestion). In fact it's a nuisance (hence ad blockers, dvr ad skipping etc).

Ralph – I'd suggest that with the 99% of people, it does more harm than good – 99x more harm in fact. In your example this is 2,970 ads that I saw but didn't respond to. I suggest this is very harmful. As marketers, we are accepting that sending irrelevant messages to 99%+ of people, interrupting them, providing zero or negative value, infringing on privacy – is all ok.

Even if social media takes this 1% and turns it into 50%, which would be a phenomenal and unheard of 50x increase, you still have 50% investment wasted and you are potentially turning 50% of people off.

The people in the 50% are still suffering with nuisance, and if you used technology to monitor behaviour and mine [ugly word] the social graph, you are potentially even elevating privacy and freedom concerns.

If we don't measure this number, we don't measure the external costs of our business, the cost to people, to society. If we want to help rewrite the rules of advertising and marketing, I suggest this is exactly where we should focus.

Lateefivy

Valid points being made here by both Ralph and Gordon . . . but I agree with Gordon a little more. ; )

In society, marketers serve a social good in part by “ringing the cash register” and in part by ethically representing their companies. I think the later is easy to do on Facebook and Twitter, but the former is really difficult. Why? Facebook and Twitter were never designed for marketing. They were designed for meeting people (i.e. dating) and real-time news, respectively. Its mostly by good luck that these tools can be used to represent companies at all, but the ROI on that is tenuous, and the downside effects are significant, as Gordon points out.

In the end, its not an all or nothing thing. Should companies join Twitter and Facebook? Sure, if there goal is merely to “represent” and they accept that they will suffer a certain but unquantifiable amount of brand damage. But if they want to ring the cash register, their efforts are better spent elsewhere.

I don't feel social media is being well-utilized by most companies or corporate entities today. There doesn't seem to be a common “strategy” for businesses to manage their social media. Some rely on internal marketing staff who really aren't sure exactly what to do, or they get someone else to do it, and that person usually doesn't understand the aim of representing the business to engage in social media. This sometimes results in irregular interactions or blatant advertising. The system will probably iron out over the next few years, but the businesses who do it first and do it right, will be better off.

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ABOUT ME

Brian Solis is a digital analyst, anthropologist, and also a futurist. In his work at Altimeter Group, Solis studies the effects of disruptive technology on business and society. He is an avid keynote speaker and award-winning author who is globally recognized as one of the most prominent thought leaders in digital transformation.

His most recent book, What's the Future of Business: Changing the Way Businesses Create Experiences (WTF), explores the landscape of connected consumerism and how business and customer relationships unfold in four distinct moments of truth. His previous book, The End of Business as Usual, explores the emergence of Generation-C, a new generation of customers and employees and how businesses must adapt to reach them. In 2009, Solis released Engage, which is regarded as the industry reference guide for businesses to market, sell and service in the social web.